Sunday, October 14, 2012

October Virtual Book Club for Kids: Move, Draw, Eat, Learn with Duck! Rabbit!

If you have followed our other posts for the Virtual Book Club, you will see that we happened to have a bit of a Duck-Rabbit theme going (The Duckling Gets A Cookieand Little White Rabbit), so I thought
this book was the perfect Amy Krouse Rosenthal book for us. Often, with
my book posts, I love to share 4 ideas the book
inspired us to do: 1. Physical Activity: Yoga (of sorts)! Both Wild Thing (almost 3) and Caterpillar (almost 15 mo) love doing yoga with me. Our rabbit pose is a lot like chair pose, but with our hands making rabbit ears instead of up in the air, and our duck post is like child's pose. I already relate yoga poses to them through pretending to be animals, which we got more inspired to do when I checked out Little Yoga: A Toddler's First Yoga Book by Rebecca Whitfeld from the library, so adding these poses was perfect.

2. Draw - AKAArt Activity: Clothespin Duck! Rabbit!
This is simple, but fun. We glued cotton balls on a clothespin to make a duck or rabbit,
depending on how you look at it, of course. Wild Thing liked attaching
the clothespin to a stick and making a Duck/Rabbit puppet. What do you see? A duck, rabbit or something else entirely?

By the way, top left-the mound of cotton balls is a big and strong camel, of course!

The best thing about this art
activity probably was the resulting new play activity - tossing cotton
balls in a muffin tin! Brilliant for two reasons: 1. costs basically
nothing (already had the muffin tin and I get the big bag of cotton
balls at the dollar store) 2. makes very little noise! (Yeah!! - Especially great for
evening play when baby is already sleeping or trying to fall asleep). I
highly recommend it. Plus, it was a child-led activity. I love following
his creativity and discovering a new way to play or create.

3.Eat - Duck/Rabbit Bread/Carrot Snack Again,
we kept it simple making carrots shaped as rabbits and bread shaped as a
duck since that is what each animal eats. I must say all of the rabbit
books we have been reading (in addition to Little White Rabbit,
we have been reading a lot of Peter Rabbit books by Beatrix Potter) have
had a positive effect on Wild Thing in terms of healthy eating. He
LOVES eating carrots now, so much so that he does not even need/ask me
to peel them. He wants to eat them just like the rabbits do!

4.
Learning Activity - Habitats/Perspective We have been doing a lot
of learning activities related to home and habitats lately. These
activities were inspired by two books that Wild Thing absolutely loves
(I think I have hit the limit on rechecks from the library): Do Ducklings Live In the Desert? by Michael Dahl and I See A Kookaburra! by Steve Jenkins (both were featured in our World Animal Day post).
We are even making our own habitat book, which I hope to share on the
blog soon, along with a series of posts on our habitat learning
experiences. Here is a sneak peek (to the left of our bee page). Duck! Rabbit!
inspired us to head outside and make our own duck and rabbit habitats
for Wild Thing to put his rubber ducky and stuffed animal rabbit in. Here are our habitats. I got 6 duckies like this at Target awhile back for 50 cents! (Psst...this is our second pond. You check out our first, very different, pond-making activity here.)

To see our process of making the habitats, through photos, go to our Facebook page. There are some really great photos there.

Of
course, another learning aspect to this book is the important lesson of
perspective, which Wild Thing actually teaches me about everyday --
through The Good Long Road of parenting, I have learned that it is not
only Wild Thing and Caterpillar that are growing, learning and reading
along the way, it is me too! Depending on your perspective, you see a
duck or you see a rabbit. A few days before we even started reading the book, Wild Thing
demonstrated the value of considering (and shifting) perspectives
when he pointed out some beautiful flowers to me in our yard.

So, tell me - what do you see? A duck? A rabbit? Weeds or flowers? I
encourage you to always try and see the
flowers in life -- Wild Thing definitely reminds me to do just that on a
daily basis as he continually points out the beauty, amazing-ness and
awesomeness of everyday things.
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14 comments:

Lovely activities. We worked on Duck Rabbit too and the different perspectives things can get. We loved your food idea well done. This is our link http://creativefunmum.blogspot.com/2012/10/october-virtual-book-club-duck-rabbit.html

Hi Jennifer, It's nice to meet you. Thank you for linking into the Kid Lit Blog Hop How does your Virtual Book Club for Kids work - if you don't mind my asking? You have a wonderful website. Your following buttons (Pinterest and G+) were not working, but I am following you via Twitter. Hope you are having a nice weekend! Cheers!

Fantastic Activities, I love the clothes pin rabbit and duck - but have to try the yoga with J and T this week. Thank you for linking up to Tuesday Tots this week and just popping by to say that I'm featuring you this week over on Rainy Day Mum